Some years ago Atsumi Kaneda, a Deloitte accountant in Japan, got so stressed by work that she developed insomnia. She looked far and wide for help getting a good night's sleep before discovering a head-massage treatment. She found it so effective that in 2009 she left the accounting profession to open a massage parlor in Kyoto.

"Everyone disagreed with my decision," Kaneda said through a translator. "Being a massage therapist in Japan is not a respected profession."

Related Articles

Today she runs Goku no Kimochi, a chain of four massage parlors in Japan that generates $10 million in annual revenue. The name means Goku's feeling and refers to a 16th-century Chinese story about a monkey king whose constrictive head ring disappears, allowing him to gain peace and enlightenment. Kaneda says she has a waiting list of 400,000 for her four shops, and 85% of her customers come back. Japanese news site Grape described her service as a "blissful sci-fi dreamland."

In May she brought her massage business to the city that never sleeps, opening Goku NYC in the Garment District. The place has caught on with Japanese businessmen and -women, who pay $150 for an hourlong massage. Kaneda has big ambitions for her company, which she hopes will do for massage parlors what Starbucks did for coffee houses.

"There are lots of well-known brand names in food, but none in massage," she said. "I believe my business has great potential and people underestimate it."

Photo

Buck Ennis

Atsumi Kaneda

One potential roadblock is massage parlors' sleazy reputation.

The approximately 1,200 of them in the city and 9,000 nationwide produce $2.5 billion in annual revenue, according to the Polaris Project, a nonprofit that aims to identify and disrupt human trafficking networks. Many are legitimate operations run by Asian immigrants, but others are fronts for prostitution or sex trafficking and are frequently raided by the police. A sweep in Florida earlier this year resulted in New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft being charged with buying sex.

In June Democratic state Sens. Jessica Ramos of Queens and Julia Salazar of Brooklyn introduced legislation to decriminalize prostitution and the sex trade in New York. The bill didn't pass amid concerns about sex trafficking, but the debate didn't do any favors for the legitimate massage industry.

Despite massage parlors' image here, Kaneda said, New York was a natural choice for her first U.S. location. After all, a lot of people here work long hours and don't sleep well.

"I see what I do as a form of health care that will become more important as the world evolves," she said.

Indeed, the business of helping people snooze is big and growing. Nearly 1 in 5 people has trouble sleeping, according to the National Institutes of Health. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine accredits more than 2,600 sleep centers, about 10 times more than in the mid-1990s. A government study showed that the percentage of the U.S. population using prescription sleeping pills to treat insomnia rose to 3.5% in 2010 from 2.0% in 1999, which indicates the number of users rose to 11 million from 6 million.

The Food and Drug Administration has viewed this trend with growing alarm. In April the agency ordered the makers of Ambien, Lunesta and Sonata to better highlight the potential side effects of their popular sleep aids, such as sleepwalking and sleep driving.

"Our ongoing safety monitoring recently reflected the risk of more serious injuries and deaths from patients on these medications," said Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Those warnings, combined with rising interest in alternative medicine, give Kaneda's massage business a powerful tailwind. In Japan she has hundreds of employees, but her nascent New York location has just four, each of whom she trained for about three months. Besides rent, labor is the only significant cost for running a massage parlor.

"You don't have to buy a lot of equipment," she said. "This is a very low-risk business. And a good one for women to get into."

Visiting Goku NYC, I walked up a flight of stairs into a dimly lit reception area where a piano and strings played in the background. The vibe, Kaneda said, is intended to evoke outer space or a dreamscape.

After watching an introductory video, I was taken to a small, dark room and seated in a reclining chair. The masseuse told me to remove my shirt and shoes—everything else stayed on—and handed me a robe. Then for about 45 minutes, she pressed her thumbs and the bottoms of her hands firmly into my scalp, forehead and jaw before applying pressure to my neck and shoulders. The idea, Kaneda explained, is to release muscle tension and promote circulation, which relaxes the brain and improves health, focus and stress levels.

I didn't fall asleep, but I certainly felt relaxed and revived.

Over a cup of green tea, I told Kaneda that her parlor could interest a lot of groggy New Yorkers, even if the sex act known as a "happy ending" isn't on the table.

Crain’s New York Business is the trusted voice of the New York business community—connecting businesses across the five boroughs by providing analysis and opinion on how to navigate New York’s complex business and political landscape.